November 8, 2022 • 27 mins
Why do people feel so unsatisfied on the job? It’s because the modern institution of work is based on the assumption that people are motivated solely by money. But research shows they’re not. Barry explains what really engages workers to love their jobs and where we got this idea about money in the first place.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to the Happiness formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli,
and unfortunately we're getting close to the end of our
journey together. I know I'm sad too, but let's do
a vibe check. How are you feeling happier, more engaged
at work? I know too soon? Last time we learned
(00:58):
that most of us just aren't that engaged with our work.
If you just google the phrase quiet quitting, they'll see
exactly what I'm talking think about today. Barry will tell
you why that is, and Adam Smith has some explaining
to do. Here's Barry. We saw that the assumptions that
(01:23):
began with Adam Smith about why people work and therefore
what the workplace should look like, have guided the development
of industrial capitalism for two centuries. And the key assumption
underlying this is that people work for a paycheck, nothing
more so that your only criterion in organizing work should
(01:47):
be efficiency. Whether they people like the work is irrelevant,
because people don't like any work. We know, I know,
and I hope you know that this view about human
beings and their attitude toward work is false. There are
lots of non financial, non monetary reasons that people give
(02:12):
for doing their work. Satisfied workers are engaged by their work.
Not all the time, of course, but often enough so
that engagement is salient to them. Satisfied workers are challenged
by their work. It forces them to stretch themselves to
(02:34):
at least occasionally go outside their comfort zones. Satisfied workers
do their work because they feel that they're in charge.
Their work day offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion.
They want that autonomy and discretion for its own sake,
and they also wanted because it's a sign of trust
(02:58):
and respect on the part of the people who oversee them.
And they use this autonomy and discretion to achieve a
level of mastery or expertise they want to achieve. They
want to learn new things, they want to develop as
workers and as people. Satisfied people do their work because
(03:23):
of the opportunities it provides for social engagement. They do
many of their tasks as part of teams, and even
when they're working alone, there are plenty of opportunities for
social interaction during works quiet moments. And finally, and I
think most importantly, satisfy people like their work. Are satisfied
(03:46):
with their work because they find what they do meaningful. Potentially,
their work makes a difference to the world. It makes
other people's lives better, and it may even make other
people's lives better in ways that are significant it. So
these are all reasons people have for doing the work
(04:11):
that they do that have nothing to do with money. Now,
there are a few occupations that have all of these features,
and I don't think there are any occupations that have
all of these features all the time. Sometimes it's drudgery,
sometimes it's too stressful. Sometimes it's not really obvious how
(04:35):
what you're doing is going to make the world better.
So there are down moments in anybody's work. But at
least we can imagine jobs where on the whole. Often engagement, challenge, autonomy,
and meaning are a part of one's work life. And
(04:59):
I've given you several examples of work like this. The
carpet manufacturer who decided that he was going to reduce
the company's environmental footprints zero, which led to unbelievably highly
motivated creative participation from the workforce because they were no
(05:21):
longer just making carpet. They were also saving the earth.
The takeover of the GM plant by Toyota, which with
the same workforce more than doubled the productivity of the output.
The phone solicitors looking for contributions to scholarship funds, who
(05:41):
were motivated by the speech of a recent graduate, who
whose opportunity to have a life changing experience at this
institution was only made possible by the fundraising of people
like the ones who were trying to get a lums
to contribute. These are all cases where people when you
(06:05):
remind people or tell people of the meaning and purpose
of what they do, you motivate them and they both
do better work and get much more satisfaction out of it.
And so the puzzle, the puzzle that I will now
try to answer for you, is, in the face of
(06:26):
all of this evidence that making work engaging, meaningful and
challenging produces better work, more profitable work, why is it
that of the people that gallop poles every year are
dissatisfied with their work, only of people say they feel
(06:53):
engaged by their jobs. Everyone else work as a source
of frustration, not of fulfillment. And why is that I
have interested in this why question essentially from my entire career.
When I started out in psychology, I was I worked
(07:18):
in the field made famous by a psychologist named B. F. Skinner,
famous for basically training rats and pigeons to do things
for food. And Skinner's of you is that incentives were
the whole story when it came to understanding behavior. If
(07:38):
you did something and you've got to pay off a reward,
you would do it again. If you did something and
you've got nothing, you would stop doing it. If you
did something and got a punishment, you would stop doing
it even faster. And understanding the way in which rewards
incentives affected behavior was essentially the way to understand all
(07:59):
behavior from Skinner's point of view. Anything we ever did
we did to get the award. We did to get
the carrot that was dangling in front of us. So
I studied this stuff and I taught this stuff, and
all the while that I was doing it, it struck
me that this couldn't be right. The reason it struck me,
(08:23):
or at least it couldn't be complete, And the reason
I thought it couldn't be complete, is that it didn't
seem to describe the behavior of almost all the people
I knew. I had lots of colleagues teaching UH in
various disciplines at the place where I taught. I observed
(08:43):
my own behavior, and it didn't seem to me that
any of what any of us were doing was governed
by the carrot that was dangling UH in front of
our noses. We didn't do it for the paycheck, although
of course if we weren't paid, we wouldn't do it,
since we had to live our lives and pay our bills.
But we were really motivated by other things. We were
(09:07):
motivated by curiosity, by the opportunity to turn on young
adults to fields that we loved UH, and the paycheck
was assent, was necessary, but incidental. And yet here was
Skinner saying that it was incentives like this that ran
the world. So I thought, this can't be right. And
(09:31):
yet as I started reading about economics and about the
way in which work is organized, I came to see
that what Skinner was describing was the way of the
world and the way of life for most people who
work in industrial settings. And so even if Skinner was wrong,
(09:56):
what he was doing was describing the world as it was,
Even if it wasn't the world as it had to be?
And uh and so I've always been interested in the
y question. Uh and I started looking at workplace organization
to look for evidence of reasons for work that have
(10:20):
little or nothing to do with the paycheck. One example
I encountered is the case of a guy named Danny Meyer,
who is a restaurant entrepreneur. He has several high end,
(10:41):
expensive restaurants in the New York area, and he has
now expanded two locations around the country for people who
are not familiar with New York restaurants. He's probably best
known for as the creator of places called shake shacks,
which are sort of fast food hamburger places that try
(11:04):
to show you as possible to deliver fast food and
not have a taste like McDonald's. Cardboard Um and Danny
Meyer wrote a book about what he calls enlightened hospitality.
(11:25):
He's been phenomenally successful. Why Well, the food is great,
to be sure, but the services also great. And the
question is how did he do it? And how is
he able to maintain it? As is, the organization he
oversaw got bigger and bigger. He says, quote hold people
(11:47):
accountable to high standards while letting them hold onto their
own dignity. In other words, make it clear that you
expect people to deliver the best they're capable of delivering,
but don't humiliate an intimid at them into doing it.
(12:07):
He says, technical excellence is less than half the job.
An emotional skill is more than half the job. And
this should remind you of a point I made about
what Jeffrey Feffer said. You should hire people on the
basis of attributes you don't know how to train, and
then teach them the things you do know how to train.
(12:30):
And what Danny Meyer says is we can and do
train for all the technical skills, training for the emotional
skills is next to impossible. What are the emotional skills? Warmth, intelligence, curiosity,
work ethic which I guess maybe an echo of grit,
(12:55):
something we talked about earlier in this course. Empathy being
able to feel put yourself in the perspective of the
customers you're serving and feel what they're feeling. Integrity, self awareness.
These are the emotional skills that he thinks produces excellence
(13:17):
in the staff at his various restaurants and gives people
who come to those restaurants the sense that they are
being extremely well cared for, the sense that for at
least this hour and a half, they are the most
important people in the world. He talks about the idea
(13:39):
of servant leadership, of giving people a chance to learn
and grow. Employees first, customers, second, profits third. How many
companies do you think operate according to those priorities? Employees first, customers, second,
(14:00):
profits third. So it's a long term view of success.
If you do it right, the profits will come. If
you pursue profits, you will effectively be engaged in self destruction.
And it's just a question of how long you can
fool how many people before it all falls apart. Key
(14:25):
trades and managers, he says honor, discipline, consistency, courage, wisdom, compassion, flexibility,
the ability to love, humility, confidence, passion for the work,
and passion for excellence. It's remarkable that what he's describing
(14:49):
is not good food service managers, but good people. In
other words, what his h model for organization is is
you hire really good people and then teach them what
they need to know in order for these really good
people to do the good work that's required of them
(15:12):
in this particular context, and as I say he has
been phenomenally successful. But again the puzzle is, how is it,
in the face of all this evidence that being an
enlightened leader produces a productive workforce, why is it that
(15:34):
so few workplaces are enlightened in this way? And the
answer I've come up with, as I hinted at a
little while ago, is idea technology. It's time for a
quick break. But when we come back, what we get
so wrong about human motivation? Let me start with an example.
(16:14):
This is a study that was done years ago where
three and four year old nursery school kids were given
the opportunity to draw with a special kind of marker,
special kind of pen. So they drew, and then the
experimenters gave them good player awards, gave some of them
(16:37):
good player awards, not others. And then three weeks later
the experimenters came back and brought the pens back and
put the pens on the drawing tables and simply kept
track of which kids drew and which kids didn't. And
what they found is that the kids who had gotten
(17:00):
good Player awards were less likely to draw than the
kids who hadn't gotten good player awards. And not only that,
but if they did draw, they drew less interesting, lower
quality pictures. In other words, paying the kids off with
(17:21):
a good player award made drawing less fun. Paying the
kids off turn play into work. And when you turn
play into work, one of the consequences is that kids
don't want to do it, and the second consequences when
(17:41):
they do it, they do it with less engagement, less interest,
and thus of lower quality. And this model of paying
people for doing what you want them to do is
the way the entire industrial system works. So the question
is do these kids like drawing or don't they like drawing?
(18:04):
Is drawing play or is drawing work? And the answer
is it depends. Drawing is play until you start paying
kids off for doing it, and then it becomes work.
And so what in effect you're doing in this nursery
school is turning an activity that is play into an
(18:25):
activity that is work. Now, imagine taking this reward incentive
structure and applying it across the board in every institution
in society, in every factory, in every retail store, in
every classroom, in every hospital, in every law firm. What
(18:47):
you're doing is turning play or work done in pursuit
of goals that are internal to the work into work,
into work that is done for the paycheck, for the bonus.
And if you look round and everywhere what you see
(19:07):
is people who are working in order to get a paycheck.
It's not hard to see how you would come to
the conclusion, as Adam Smith did, that the only reason
people ever do anything is to get paid. But the
thing to notice is that Smith was not describing something
(19:29):
essential about the world. He was describing what the world
looked like when work was organized in the way that
he suggested work should be organized. In other words, what
Smith was doing was creating a truth rather than discovering it.
(19:49):
Smith was inventing a truth rather than discovering it. Let
me say this another way. If you are working on
an assembly line, doing exactly the same thing every ten seconds,
for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty
two weeks a year, then the only possible explanation for
(20:13):
why you show up at work is that you're going
to get paid for doing it. But that's not a
reflection of your basic nature as a human being. It's
a reflection of what you're like when you're given completely
unrewarding work to do. If you created workplaces that had
a different structure, you would find that people in fact
(20:37):
or have multiple motives for working and not just the paycheck.
And so Smith, by being the father of the factory system,
was creating something rather than discovering something fundamental about human nature.
And there's a big difference between discovering and creating. Here's
(21:00):
the I think is the heart of the difference. Scientists
are in the business of discovery all all the time.
You discover the awesome power of nuclear energy. Is that
a good thing or a bad thing? Is that a
moral act or an immoral act? Well, there's a sense
in which those are the wrong questions to be asking,
(21:22):
because the discovery is simply the discovery of a fact
about the world, and whether we're better off for knowing
that fact or not is a different question than whether
the actually discovery of that fact is immoral or moral. However,
(21:44):
when you create a nuclear power plant, you're not discovering anymore.
You're inventing. And when we invent things, when we create things,
then it's quite appropriate to ask is it is this
a good invention or a bad invention? Is this a
moral invention or an immoral advance invention? Is this going
(22:06):
to make people's lives better, or is this going to
make people's lives worse? And so, if you think that
what Adam Smith did was discover something about human nature,
then the issue of whether he should have discovered it
or whether it was a moral discovery is irrelevant. If
you think, however, that by creating the factory system, Smith
(22:29):
invented a human nature, now all of a sudden it
becomes appropriate to ask whether this invention was a good one,
whether this invention improved lives or made lives worse, diminished lives.
And so, what I mean by idea technology is that
just as cell phones and m r s and computers,
(22:55):
the technology of things changes the world that people live in.
Ideas also change the world that people live in. If
you have the idea that people only work for pay,
that will lead to a restructuring of work so that
(23:15):
the only reason people show up at work is to
get paid, and that you will have invented a notion
about human motivation that then gets embodied in the institutions
that people have to live among. Uh, And this new
idea about human beings becomes a piece of technology that
(23:36):
changes the way the world that human beings face. So
to give you a slightly different example. If we think
birth defects are acts of God, then we pray before
we give birth. If we think birth defects are just
(23:59):
acts of chance, then we grit our teeth and throw
the dice, hoping for the best. If we think birth
defects are the product of prenatal neglect, then we take
better care of pregnant women. How we understand the causes
of birth defects affects what we do about them. How
(24:22):
we understand the motives people have for showing up at
work effects what we do about that. And that's what
I mean when I talk about idea technology. What the
philosopher economist Karl Mark said two years ago is that
(24:48):
there are some ideas that we have about the world
that are false, and he called false ideas about the
world ideology. One of the false ideas he thought people
had about the world was Adam Smith's idea that people
just work for pay. So he regarded that as an
(25:10):
example of a false idea or an ideology, and it
led to the creation of a factory system that made
that idea true. Let me just try to reiterate that
and uh and make it a little bit more concrete.
(25:31):
Suppose you're an astronomer and you are trying to capture
the laws that underlie the motion of planets and stars,
and so you write you develop a theory about planetary motion.
I am reasonably confident that your theory about planetary motion
(25:53):
will have no effect on how the planets move. The
planets are completely indifferent to the way in which you
understand them. However, if you develop a theory about human motion,
which is to say, human motivation, and you articulate that theory,
it is quite possible that your theory about what moves
(26:17):
people will in fact influence what moves people in the future.
If I learn that the only reason people work is
to get paid, then when I get to be old
enough to be looking for a job, I will go
looking for a job that pays me as much as
(26:37):
I can possibly get, Because you know, I learned in
school that the only reason people work is to get paid.
So this is what I mean by idea technology. It's
ideas about what how people operate that may be false,
but nonetheless may have a big impact on the institutions
(27:00):
we live among and have to live within. Y thanks
for listening. I hope you'll join us in our final episode,
where Barry talks about how we can fix this. The
Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production of
(27:21):
I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying
the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to the Happiness formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli,
and unfortunately we're getting close to the end of our
journey together. I know I'm sad too, but let's do
a vibe check. How are you feeling happier, more engaged
at work? I know too soon? Last time we learned
(00:58):
that most of us just aren't that engaged with our work.
If you just google the phrase quiet quitting, they'll see
exactly what I'm talking think about today. Barry will tell
you why that is, and Adam Smith has some explaining
to do. Here's Barry. We saw that the assumptions that
(01:23):
began with Adam Smith about why people work and therefore
what the workplace should look like, have guided the development
of industrial capitalism for two centuries. And the key assumption
underlying this is that people work for a paycheck, nothing
more so that your only criterion in organizing work should
(01:47):
be efficiency. Whether they people like the work is irrelevant,
because people don't like any work. We know, I know,
and I hope you know that this view about human
beings and their attitude toward work is false. There are
lots of non financial, non monetary reasons that people give
(02:12):
for doing their work. Satisfied workers are engaged by their work.
Not all the time, of course, but often enough so
that engagement is salient to them. Satisfied workers are challenged
by their work. It forces them to stretch themselves to
(02:34):
at least occasionally go outside their comfort zones. Satisfied workers
do their work because they feel that they're in charge.
Their work day offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion.
They want that autonomy and discretion for its own sake,
and they also wanted because it's a sign of trust
(02:58):
and respect on the part of the people who oversee them.
And they use this autonomy and discretion to achieve a
level of mastery or expertise they want to achieve. They
want to learn new things, they want to develop as
workers and as people. Satisfied people do their work because
(03:23):
of the opportunities it provides for social engagement. They do
many of their tasks as part of teams, and even
when they're working alone, there are plenty of opportunities for
social interaction during works quiet moments. And finally, and I
think most importantly, satisfy people like their work. Are satisfied
(03:46):
with their work because they find what they do meaningful. Potentially,
their work makes a difference to the world. It makes
other people's lives better, and it may even make other
people's lives better in ways that are significant it. So
these are all reasons people have for doing the work
(04:11):
that they do that have nothing to do with money. Now,
there are a few occupations that have all of these features,
and I don't think there are any occupations that have
all of these features all the time. Sometimes it's drudgery,
sometimes it's too stressful. Sometimes it's not really obvious how
(04:35):
what you're doing is going to make the world better.
So there are down moments in anybody's work. But at
least we can imagine jobs where on the whole. Often engagement, challenge, autonomy,
and meaning are a part of one's work life. And
(04:59):
I've given you several examples of work like this. The
carpet manufacturer who decided that he was going to reduce
the company's environmental footprints zero, which led to unbelievably highly
motivated creative participation from the workforce because they were no
(05:21):
longer just making carpet. They were also saving the earth.
The takeover of the GM plant by Toyota, which with
the same workforce more than doubled the productivity of the output.
The phone solicitors looking for contributions to scholarship funds, who
(05:41):
were motivated by the speech of a recent graduate, who
whose opportunity to have a life changing experience at this
institution was only made possible by the fundraising of people
like the ones who were trying to get a lums
to contribute. These are all cases where people when you
(06:05):
remind people or tell people of the meaning and purpose
of what they do, you motivate them and they both
do better work and get much more satisfaction out of it.
And so the puzzle, the puzzle that I will now
try to answer for you, is, in the face of
(06:26):
all of this evidence that making work engaging, meaningful and
challenging produces better work, more profitable work, why is it
that of the people that gallop poles every year are
dissatisfied with their work, only of people say they feel
(06:53):
engaged by their jobs. Everyone else work as a source
of frustration, not of fulfillment. And why is that I
have interested in this why question essentially from my entire career.
When I started out in psychology, I was I worked
(07:18):
in the field made famous by a psychologist named B. F. Skinner,
famous for basically training rats and pigeons to do things
for food. And Skinner's of you is that incentives were
the whole story when it came to understanding behavior. If
(07:38):
you did something and you've got to pay off a reward,
you would do it again. If you did something and
you've got nothing, you would stop doing it. If you
did something and got a punishment, you would stop doing
it even faster. And understanding the way in which rewards
incentives affected behavior was essentially the way to understand all
(07:59):
behavior from Skinner's point of view. Anything we ever did
we did to get the award. We did to get
the carrot that was dangling in front of us. So
I studied this stuff and I taught this stuff, and
all the while that I was doing it, it struck
me that this couldn't be right. The reason it struck me,
(08:23):
or at least it couldn't be complete, And the reason
I thought it couldn't be complete, is that it didn't
seem to describe the behavior of almost all the people
I knew. I had lots of colleagues teaching UH in
various disciplines at the place where I taught. I observed
(08:43):
my own behavior, and it didn't seem to me that
any of what any of us were doing was governed
by the carrot that was dangling UH in front of
our noses. We didn't do it for the paycheck, although
of course if we weren't paid, we wouldn't do it,
since we had to live our lives and pay our bills.
But we were really motivated by other things. We were
(09:07):
motivated by curiosity, by the opportunity to turn on young
adults to fields that we loved UH, and the paycheck
was assent, was necessary, but incidental. And yet here was
Skinner saying that it was incentives like this that ran
the world. So I thought, this can't be right. And
(09:31):
yet as I started reading about economics and about the
way in which work is organized, I came to see
that what Skinner was describing was the way of the
world and the way of life for most people who
work in industrial settings. And so even if Skinner was wrong,
(09:56):
what he was doing was describing the world as it was,
Even if it wasn't the world as it had to be?
And uh and so I've always been interested in the
y question. Uh and I started looking at workplace organization
to look for evidence of reasons for work that have
(10:20):
little or nothing to do with the paycheck. One example
I encountered is the case of a guy named Danny Meyer,
who is a restaurant entrepreneur. He has several high end,
(10:41):
expensive restaurants in the New York area, and he has
now expanded two locations around the country for people who
are not familiar with New York restaurants. He's probably best
known for as the creator of places called shake shacks,
which are sort of fast food hamburger places that try
(11:04):
to show you as possible to deliver fast food and
not have a taste like McDonald's. Cardboard Um and Danny
Meyer wrote a book about what he calls enlightened hospitality.
(11:25):
He's been phenomenally successful. Why Well, the food is great,
to be sure, but the services also great. And the
question is how did he do it? And how is
he able to maintain it? As is, the organization he
oversaw got bigger and bigger. He says, quote hold people
(11:47):
accountable to high standards while letting them hold onto their
own dignity. In other words, make it clear that you
expect people to deliver the best they're capable of delivering,
but don't humiliate an intimid at them into doing it.
(12:07):
He says, technical excellence is less than half the job.
An emotional skill is more than half the job. And
this should remind you of a point I made about
what Jeffrey Feffer said. You should hire people on the
basis of attributes you don't know how to train, and
then teach them the things you do know how to train.
(12:30):
And what Danny Meyer says is we can and do
train for all the technical skills, training for the emotional
skills is next to impossible. What are the emotional skills? Warmth, intelligence, curiosity,
work ethic which I guess maybe an echo of grit,
(12:55):
something we talked about earlier in this course. Empathy being
able to feel put yourself in the perspective of the
customers you're serving and feel what they're feeling. Integrity, self awareness.
These are the emotional skills that he thinks produces excellence
(13:17):
in the staff at his various restaurants and gives people
who come to those restaurants the sense that they are
being extremely well cared for, the sense that for at
least this hour and a half, they are the most
important people in the world. He talks about the idea
(13:39):
of servant leadership, of giving people a chance to learn
and grow. Employees first, customers, second, profits third. How many
companies do you think operate according to those priorities? Employees first, customers, second,
(14:00):
profits third. So it's a long term view of success.
If you do it right, the profits will come. If
you pursue profits, you will effectively be engaged in self destruction.
And it's just a question of how long you can
fool how many people before it all falls apart. Key
(14:25):
trades and managers, he says honor, discipline, consistency, courage, wisdom, compassion, flexibility,
the ability to love, humility, confidence, passion for the work,
and passion for excellence. It's remarkable that what he's describing
(14:49):
is not good food service managers, but good people. In
other words, what his h model for organization is is
you hire really good people and then teach them what
they need to know in order for these really good
people to do the good work that's required of them
(15:12):
in this particular context, and as I say he has
been phenomenally successful. But again the puzzle is, how is it,
in the face of all this evidence that being an
enlightened leader produces a productive workforce, why is it that
(15:34):
so few workplaces are enlightened in this way? And the
answer I've come up with, as I hinted at a
little while ago, is idea technology. It's time for a
quick break. But when we come back, what we get
so wrong about human motivation? Let me start with an example.
(16:14):
This is a study that was done years ago where
three and four year old nursery school kids were given
the opportunity to draw with a special kind of marker,
special kind of pen. So they drew, and then the
experimenters gave them good player awards, gave some of them
(16:37):
good player awards, not others. And then three weeks later
the experimenters came back and brought the pens back and
put the pens on the drawing tables and simply kept
track of which kids drew and which kids didn't. And
what they found is that the kids who had gotten
(17:00):
good Player awards were less likely to draw than the
kids who hadn't gotten good player awards. And not only that,
but if they did draw, they drew less interesting, lower
quality pictures. In other words, paying the kids off with
(17:21):
a good player award made drawing less fun. Paying the
kids off turn play into work. And when you turn
play into work, one of the consequences is that kids
don't want to do it, and the second consequences when
(17:41):
they do it, they do it with less engagement, less interest,
and thus of lower quality. And this model of paying
people for doing what you want them to do is
the way the entire industrial system works. So the question
is do these kids like drawing or don't they like drawing?
(18:04):
Is drawing play or is drawing work? And the answer
is it depends. Drawing is play until you start paying
kids off for doing it, and then it becomes work.
And so what in effect you're doing in this nursery
school is turning an activity that is play into an
(18:25):
activity that is work. Now, imagine taking this reward incentive
structure and applying it across the board in every institution
in society, in every factory, in every retail store, in
every classroom, in every hospital, in every law firm. What
(18:47):
you're doing is turning play or work done in pursuit
of goals that are internal to the work into work,
into work that is done for the paycheck, for the bonus.
And if you look round and everywhere what you see
(19:07):
is people who are working in order to get a paycheck.
It's not hard to see how you would come to
the conclusion, as Adam Smith did, that the only reason
people ever do anything is to get paid. But the
thing to notice is that Smith was not describing something
(19:29):
essential about the world. He was describing what the world
looked like when work was organized in the way that
he suggested work should be organized. In other words, what
Smith was doing was creating a truth rather than discovering it.
(19:49):
Smith was inventing a truth rather than discovering it. Let
me say this another way. If you are working on
an assembly line, doing exactly the same thing every ten seconds,
for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty
two weeks a year, then the only possible explanation for
(20:13):
why you show up at work is that you're going
to get paid for doing it. But that's not a
reflection of your basic nature as a human being. It's
a reflection of what you're like when you're given completely
unrewarding work to do. If you created workplaces that had
a different structure, you would find that people in fact
(20:37):
or have multiple motives for working and not just the paycheck.
And so Smith, by being the father of the factory system,
was creating something rather than discovering something fundamental about human nature.
And there's a big difference between discovering and creating. Here's
(21:00):
the I think is the heart of the difference. Scientists
are in the business of discovery all all the time.
You discover the awesome power of nuclear energy. Is that
a good thing or a bad thing? Is that a
moral act or an immoral act? Well, there's a sense
in which those are the wrong questions to be asking,
(21:22):
because the discovery is simply the discovery of a fact
about the world, and whether we're better off for knowing
that fact or not is a different question than whether
the actually discovery of that fact is immoral or moral. However,
(21:44):
when you create a nuclear power plant, you're not discovering anymore.
You're inventing. And when we invent things, when we create things,
then it's quite appropriate to ask is it is this
a good invention or a bad invention? Is this a
moral invention or an immoral advance invention? Is this going
(22:06):
to make people's lives better, or is this going to
make people's lives worse? And so, if you think that
what Adam Smith did was discover something about human nature,
then the issue of whether he should have discovered it
or whether it was a moral discovery is irrelevant. If
you think, however, that by creating the factory system, Smith
(22:29):
invented a human nature, now all of a sudden it
becomes appropriate to ask whether this invention was a good one,
whether this invention improved lives or made lives worse, diminished lives.
And so, what I mean by idea technology is that
just as cell phones and m r s and computers,
(22:55):
the technology of things changes the world that people live in.
Ideas also change the world that people live in. If
you have the idea that people only work for pay,
that will lead to a restructuring of work so that
(23:15):
the only reason people show up at work is to
get paid, and that you will have invented a notion
about human motivation that then gets embodied in the institutions
that people have to live among. Uh, And this new
idea about human beings becomes a piece of technology that
(23:36):
changes the way the world that human beings face. So
to give you a slightly different example. If we think
birth defects are acts of God, then we pray before
we give birth. If we think birth defects are just
(23:59):
acts of chance, then we grit our teeth and throw
the dice, hoping for the best. If we think birth
defects are the product of prenatal neglect, then we take
better care of pregnant women. How we understand the causes
of birth defects affects what we do about them. How
(24:22):
we understand the motives people have for showing up at
work effects what we do about that. And that's what
I mean when I talk about idea technology. What the
philosopher economist Karl Mark said two years ago is that
(24:48):
there are some ideas that we have about the world
that are false, and he called false ideas about the
world ideology. One of the false ideas he thought people
had about the world was Adam Smith's idea that people
just work for pay. So he regarded that as an
(25:10):
example of a false idea or an ideology, and it
led to the creation of a factory system that made
that idea true. Let me just try to reiterate that
and uh and make it a little bit more concrete.
(25:31):
Suppose you're an astronomer and you are trying to capture
the laws that underlie the motion of planets and stars,
and so you write you develop a theory about planetary motion.
I am reasonably confident that your theory about planetary motion
(25:53):
will have no effect on how the planets move. The
planets are completely indifferent to the way in which you
understand them. However, if you develop a theory about human motion,
which is to say, human motivation, and you articulate that theory,
it is quite possible that your theory about what moves
(26:17):
people will in fact influence what moves people in the future.
If I learn that the only reason people work is
to get paid, then when I get to be old
enough to be looking for a job, I will go
looking for a job that pays me as much as
(26:37):
I can possibly get, Because you know, I learned in
school that the only reason people work is to get paid.
So this is what I mean by idea technology. It's
ideas about what how people operate that may be false,
but nonetheless may have a big impact on the institutions
(27:00):
we live among and have to live within. Y thanks
for listening. I hope you'll join us in our final episode,
where Barry talks about how we can fix this. The
Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production of
(27:21):
I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying
the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
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